


Shifting Paradigms

by callmecathy



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Brittle partnerships, Gen, Pre-Risk 1x16, Subtle subterfuge and evasive maneuvers, Wariness and trust issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 11:33:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmecathy/pseuds/callmecathy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'll wake you in two hours."<br/>"...I don't have a concussion."<br/>Finch's voice spiraled down in concentric circles. "I'll come back shortly."<br/><em>Good</em>, Reese almost said, before he caught himself.</p>
<p>(or: Trust doesn't come easily to these men. But they're learning.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shifting Paradigms

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Thomas Kuhn's concept of the "paradigm shift", in his 1962 _The Structure of Scientific Revolution_.

_Day 14_

By the time he was halfway through the day Reese was thinking of paltry platitudes such as "death by a thousand cuts"; when he tracked his way into Finch's Library, he'd acquired a half dozen new bruises and two grazes. They'd been amateurs, the ones shooting at him: hit-and-miss spark-flying bullets that ricocheted through the alleyway. He supposed he should have felt grateful.

He didn't.

(He wondered, not for the first time in the two weeks since Finch had hired him, whether this was going to be fast enough).

Finch was typing at his monitors. He revolved in his chair, expression tightening as he took him in. "What happened?"

"You weren't listening?"

"There is a disparity between what one can decipher aurally; quite another to see it. Do you...?"

Reese went to one of the cabinets, started rummaging through the drawers. He couldn't quite bring himself to ask; he wasn't even sure if Finch kept the sorts of supplies he needed around.

Finch was watching at him. He gestured slightly, towards the farthest cabinet. Reese found a bulging black bag in the top drawer. He pulled the back of a chair to the side and dropped into it.

Finch had almost everything. Saline lines, a defibrillator, vast amounts of bandages and gauze and sutures. Syringes, a stash of Lidocaine. "You're well prepared." Reese said, taping up the first graze.

"I try to be."

He felt his ribs, determined that only one was cracked. He couldn't reach the second graze: it was sting-burning on the back of his left shoulder and the threads off his suit grated at the edges. "You should get a different antiseptic. Not iodine."

"No?"

"More painful."

"Ah." He sounded-- he almost sounded-- regretful. Reese wondered, once again, about the caliber of this man.

The sound of typing still hadn't resumed. Reese grimaced, struggling to reach his shoulder; his fingers came away wet with blood.

Finch cleared his throat. "Can I assist you?"

"Do you know how?"

"No..." His mouth twisted distastefully. "But I can learn."

Reese spent enough time debating whether or not to let Finch help him to logically register that he wasn't quite sure _why_ he was debating it. Straight off the field, one couldn't be picky about who patched them up. He let his arms fall.

Finch carefully pulled his chair forward and reached for the first aid kit.

Reese wasn't sure why allowing Finch this felt like giving him a win. "Probably needs stitches." Reese said.

Finch squinted at the needle as he threaded it.

"Don't go too far in. Don't go far enough, and they'll tear out. You need to go through the sub-dermal layers."

"They all look the same to me." He soaked the needle and thread with the disinfectant, and then raised the iodine-slicked rag towards his shoulder. "This first."

"Yes," Reese answered, and then gritted his teeth.

 

_Day 38_

Another long night, although Finch could seldom tell when night turned into morning. He woke to his phone beeping: Reese's GPS dot, converging on his own. He struggled to lift his head from the crook of his arm, leverage himself into a sitting position. Far from the first time since the accident, he was stuck.

Reese's footsteps moved into the main area and approached the table. "Sleeping at your desk again, Finch? Don't you have a bedroom here?"

He managed a soundless exhale. (He could wait this out. He always did.) "We have a new number."

Silence. Reese was waiting.

His neck throbbed, flickering spasms down the length of his back and into his leg. Pain, he could deal with; but he literally _could not move._ He'd spent hours here, once, waiting. Waiting it out.

"Need a little help?" Reese asked.

 When he didn't answer a hand slipped under his arm and came to rest flat against his shoulder; another eased onto his back. Reese slowly levered him upright. Asking hadn't so much as occurred to Finch.

The proximity startled Finch. It had been awhile. Reese's eyes were dark and all too reflective; that void there, Finch had realized-- with, perhaps, undue shock-- was unsettlingly close to a mirror. He reached out and gripped the edge of the table, steadying himself, leaning away. Reese released him and retreated to the glass board.

"Is this her?"

"Keila Brennan." Finch said, straightening his glasses. "She lives in Staten Island, works as an Orthodontic nurse. Been employed at Larson's Orthodontics for..." Reese was digging around in a drawer. "...five years. I've looked into a list of the office's more recent patients. A few have raised complaints."

"That can't be... coinci _dental._ " Reese looked, as he always did when making a poor joke, unfathomably pleased with himself. He withdrew a heat pad-- the one, Finch thought, that he had left out for Reese after he'd sprained his wrist in a fight-- and placed it on the edge of the table.

Well within reach.

Reese was pointedly looking at the board again. There was a play here, Finch was sure; he just wasn't sure what it was yet. Rather than attempt to deduce it, he reached towards the printer and handed Reese a list of names. "You can start here."

He spent the day chasing down leads on Miss Brennan and ignoring the heat pad. Acknowledging it would mean admitting to a half dozen John Reese inexplicables.

 

_Day 54_

It wasn't that Reese didn't see the crowbar coming. It was just that the other two guys both had guns and taking the hit to the head was the least lethal of options to not avoid.

When he woke it was pouring. The overhang of the alleyway was riddled with holes and his suit hung on him soaked and five pounds heavier. It took him awhile to get to his feet.

He ended up in the Library. (He wasn't quite sure how. Or why.)

The stairs were difficult.

Finch was pulling on his coat and snatching his keys from the corner of the table when Reese staggered into the main area. He grabbed the wall to keep from falling over.

"Mr. _Reese_. Your _head._ "

"Going somewhere, Finch?"

"To find you." He hurried forward. "What happened?"

"We were wrong about Tierson." He groped out for another handhold.

Finch reached for him. "Here." He levered Reese's arm across his shoulder, wove his arm around him, took a wavering step. Reese was too dizzy not to stop himself from leaning on him.

It was an awkward limp-stumble down the hall: there was nothing remotely compatible about their strides. A door opened, black on black. Reese pulled back.

Finch hissed out a breath of pain. "Reese--" He struggled to the side, hand flapping out against the wall. "It's just a--" The light switched on: a small space, a spare lamp and a laptop and a cot riddled with uncomfortable-looking springs.

Reese stopped struggling, catching himself on Finch's shoulder and the frame of the door. "This your--" The ground tilted. Suddenly he was lying on his back, on the cot. "Is this your bedroom?"

Finch didn't answer. If his uneasy expression was any indication, it was.

"Don't worry. I won't tell anyone about it."

A blanket fell over him, warm and wool and scratchy.

"I'll wake you in two hours."

"...I don't have a concussion."

Finch's voice spiraled down in concentric circles. "I'll come back shortly."

_Good,_ Reese almost said, before he caught himself.

 

_Day 78_

"Looks like Hale's turning in for the night."

Finch could hear the call of sirens and the thrum of traffic through Reese's side of the line. Cloistered as he was behind the thick walls of the Library, it was, however tenuous, his only connection to the outside world.

"Call it a night." Finch told him. "You should get some rest."

"Are you?"

His monitors were running lines and lines of endless code; he still needed to narrow down the threat to Hale in a long line of possibilities. (Something about Reese returning with bruises and bullet grazes every other day made Finch want to overcompensate on his side of things.) "Miles to go, Mr. Reese."

"Not as many as you might think." Reese clicked off.

Finch tried not to get into a staring contest with the cabinet that held his pain medication. There was a slow-burning heat rolling through his leg and his back and his neck: too many hours spent locked in one single rigid position.

He was buried in research of Hale's secretary, Hale's personal finances, and Hale's corporate finances, when the smell of food drifted into the room.

"Who knew there were twenty-four hour pizza parlors?" Reese said.

"Apparently you did." Finch swiveled. Reese had four flat boxes piled awkwardly in his arms. "Have they really increased the portion sizes that much?"

"I didn't know what kind you liked."

And Finch wouldn't have told him. He wasn't sure whether Reese's current presence now or the dinner variety surprised him more. (He didn't understand Reese. He had all the data, and he still didn't understand him.)

Reese carefully cleared the side of the tables without the monitors. Finch could feel the weight of his gaze on him. After a moment he stood, drawing himself out of the pain and the exhaustion, and flipped open a lid.

"Napkins are in the cupboard." Finch said. "I'll get the plates."

 

_Day 85_

Reese's heater was rattling. It wasn't the car's fault, he figured; it had worked fine until the fourth time he'd used it as a battering ram against someone else's vechicle.

He held his hands over the vents, shifting deeper into his coat. Frost bit at the air and limned the trees and the gray-slate of the facility three hundred meters from his car.

The convenient thing about being dead, Reese supposed, was that one didn't have to make any additional arrangements when death became more than just a technicality.

A rap on the window.

He whipped around, drawing his gun.

Finch's nose was red from the cold. After a second Reese unlocked the door. He slipped inside, along with a blast of wind and whirls of snow.

"You really shouldn't remove the battery from your phone, Mr. Reese. It makes it much more difficult to find you."

Reese looked at him.

"Bird camera." Finch answered, nodding towards one of the trees, and his lips twitched minutely. Reese thought he saw the tiny pinprick blink of a red dot twenty feet high in the limbs.

He exhaled. "What are you doing here, Finch?"

Finch reached into his coat and withdrew a pair of gloves. "I thought you might be cold." When Reese didn't move he laid them on the dashboard, within reach.

"He was seventeen." Reese said.

Finch's lips pressed together.

"A child."

He blinked: a wince.

"I lost him."

"Killing them won't change anything."

"Never said it would."

"Nor will getting yourself killed."

Reese looked at the facility.

"We have enough evidence to incarcerate them for a very long time." Finch was looking at him. "I'll take care of it. You just have to let me."

Reese had spent a great deal of time telling himself that he wouldn't believe in anything again. But he believed Finch. After a moment he leaned forward and started the ignition with a turn of the key.

 

_Day 104_

In the darkness he was limbless. Timeless, and nothing to be in time for; soundless, except for faint echoing footsteps above. With each one he felt himself angling towards the direction he thought the door was in-- although exits and entrances were becoming more doubtful every moment-- and tensing if the steps sounded as if they were getting closer.

He wasn't sure how long it was before he started hearing gunshots. He wasn't sure how long it was before the door banged open. (He wasn't sure if he had expected it to).

"Reese?" Finch rasped, fast, desperate, compulsive-- far too compulsively.

Fumbling, a grunt of pain, hard heavy pants. "It's me." An arm clenched under his own, too tight. Finch could feel the signs of war on Reese, the dust and the grime and the blood; he could feel Reese's chest heaving against his side. He hauled them through the basement and outside and into his car and then he drove.

Finch's hands were shaking. A subtle little tremor in his lap that he couldn't stop; he pressed them together, uselessly. He hated that. He hated the helplessness of it, his body giving out on him, his nervous system exploiting him. "I want--" He swallowed, twice, till his voice was his own. "Take me to the Library."

Reese's fingers were clenched white around the steering wheel. "Little late to be up, don't you think?" And there was a harsh, ragged edge to his voice. Finch filed it away to decode later.

"I'll call a driver. I'll..." He was so tired. Tired, and this-- he had never expected any of this.

Research the numbers. Pass on the information. Save a life.

It was supposed to be simple.

"Let me take you home." Reese said.

Finch opened his eyes.

"Let me take you to your _safe_ house." He rephrased.

He looked at him. Reese's gaze was turned towards the windshield but his face was jarringly sincere in that half-light. And this, too. He had expected _Reese_ to be simple. Finch  shut his eyes again for a moment. "If I tell you, are you going to go back later and search it?"

"Yes." Reese said honestly.

The streetlights were blurring steaks of yellow across the dashboard as they passed them and the rumble of the engine was low, and Reese was waiting. Finch gave him an address.

                                                                                                           *

He woke four times in the night, seeing eyes, seeing teeth, razor-edged faces. The fifth time, he grabbed his phone-- an impulse, still ingrained into his hands: he'd never been much of an insomniac but when he was he'd call Nathan (because Nathan was a worrier, and he tended to worry away the night; because during the period of his divorce Nathan was just as relieved for a diversion from the hours of not-quite-night-and-not-quite-morning.

Even now, he still knew those buttons in the dark.

Ghost remnants, same as everything now.

He started to close his phone. Stopped.

There was a pinprick dot centered on the screen, a few hundred feet outside of the safe house. It was the GPS location from Reese's phone.

He laid his mobile back onto the bedside table and shut his eyes. Letting this make him feel safe was a dangerous lure. He gave in anway.

Reese stayed through the night.

 

_Day 148_

"There was nothing you could have done." Finch told him.

Reese could still taste it: the mugginess of blood, the rust and the salt and the death. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

A low, weary exhalation. Finch's voice came out reflexive. "I wish it did."

                                                                                                           *

He felt like a drink.

Every time he swallowed he felt dust and he wanted.

His fingers itched for the cold feel of the bottle.

He was very tired.

There was a Jack Daniels in the back of his kitchen cupboard. He kept just one. He liked to know his options. He was eying the cupboard door (he was staring down oblivion) when his phone rang.

Reaching for it was, he thought vaguely, as familiar now as pulling his gun.

"Fifth and Pearl." Finch said.

It was two in the morning. "Another number?"

"Not exactly."

Reese drove, pretending he wasn't a razor-edge away from shaking with relief. He passed through swirling snow and circles of lamplight, till he was pulling against the curb in a residential area; the building was small, innocuous, subtle. A safe house.

The curtains were closed but slight glows came from inside, them and the blue-light off a computer monitor, and when the light flickered Reese knew Finch was flitting past the window.

He tapped his ear piece. "Is this an intervention?"

"The door's unlocked."

Reese watched the house and listened to over-the-line noises: he picked up the metal scrape of a tea kettle, water boiling, familiar footfalls. Six minutes passed before he realized he was trying to determine whether it was a trap.

The air twisted on odd-ended drafts that had snowflakes littering the sidewalk and diving down Reese's coat. By the time he reached the up-step to the house tufts of snow had slipped in past his ankles. It didn't matter, of course, lock or no-- he could breach almost any medium-security residence given the means and the time. There was a statement being made here. If Reese had any sense-- hell, if he were truly a good agent-- he'd leave right now. Kara was murmuring in his ear. Snow was echoing on the wind.

He turned the knob and shut it behind himself.

It was warm. And quiet. Almost silent, in a way that the city never was: the traffic was only a soft-droning hum, because as Reese well knew, Finch preferred thick walls. Most people would have had artwork or pictures lining the walls; not Finch: they were barren. He passed four doors, every one closed. He itched to open all of them.

Rustling noises drifted along the hallway and he stopped at the edge.

Finch was tinkering around the kitchen, pouring a cup of tea, taking an experimental sip before pulling a second glass from the cupboard.

"Would you prefer tea or cocoa?" Finch asked, back turned.

Uncanny. "Cocoa?"

He grabbed a box from the counter. "You're not prejudiced against two percent milk, are you? I'm afraid that's the only thing in the fridge."

"Cocoa?" Reese repeated.

"Hot chocolate, Mr. Reese." Finch said, amusement flickering in at the edges. "I hope you don't mind if it's powdered."

"Do I get marshmallows?"

Finch finally turned, his expression-- purely startled. Reese counted it as a win. Finch slowly tore open a Swiss Miss package and tapped the opposite end until the powder came out. "How many would you like?"

"Four."

The cupboards _thunked_ open. The package wasn't high, only far back: requiring an intensive maneuver far beyond the limitations of the other man's body. Reese found himself moving into the kitchen.

"It's a nice place."

"I certainly hope so. You should have seen the closing costs."

He counted out four marshmallows, washed off the spoon, returned both to their previous places. Finch was watching him with a mixture of bemusement and caution. With him, those two expressions often came hand in hand. He grasped his mug and limped into the living room.

Reese warmed his hands around the cup.

Of course it was an intervention. Ordinarily, Reese would have skipped it. But Finch had offered the additional lure of the safe house, and that was one secret (or gift? Dangerously, Reese wasn't sure which) that he could hardly resist. Which Finch well knew.

Reese left the kitchen. He knew better than to wander about the house, but Finch was perched in the arm chair and that made the living area fair game. There was a laptop on the coffee table, running code; a chess board stashed on the lower shelf; a bookshelf piled with tomes and a novel half-opened on the arm of the sofa. Hardly anything identifiable, nothing unique.

But there had to be something. There was always something.

It was silent behind him, not a flicker of typing.

Finch was wearing the same unsettled expression he had had on when he'd guided Reese into his "bedroom" in the Library.

"You're not planning on sleeping?" Reese asked.

"It's almost morning." Finch snapped the laptop shut, leaned forward and took the book off the sofa.

Reese crossed to the sofa and sat, opposite Finch and in sight of the hallway, so that he could read the title.

_The Final Problem._

It was only after he'd settled that he realized Finch had just played him.

"Did you intend for Reichenbach to happen?" Reese asked him.

"Did you?" A page flicked.

After a moment he leaned forward, taking the chessboard from the shelf. He set himself up a game on the coffee table. He "won" against himself four times, lost three; and he was far from brilliant but certainly good. Being around Finch had made him better. In his time with the Agency, evaluating options and evasive maneuvers had served him well and kept him alive-- but he'd never met another person who lived and breathed stratagem as competently as Finch did.

His fingers hovered over a white knight. He could feel Finch watching him. Experimentally, he started to touch a pawn.

"Please don't." Finch said, sounding pained.

"If I do?"

"You'll lose, Mr. Reese. In approximately three moves, if you play the other side right."

He couldn't resist wiggling his fingers. Finch's mouth quirked. "Suggestions?"

The book thudded as Finch shut it. "It seems," he said, "that you are in need of a partner."

Reese would lose, of course, but that hardly mattered. He leaned down and began unlacing his soaked shoes. "I guess I am," He answered, and if he said it to the floor, that hardly mattered either.

**Author's Note:**

> The "miles to go" is from Robert Frost's _Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening_ , because, METAPHORS.


End file.
